ART IN REVIEW; 'Germany Is Your America'

By KEN JOHNSON

Published: October 28, 2011

Broadway 1602

1181 Broadway, at 28th Street, Chelsea

Through Dec. 15

This dryly poetic exhibition is based on a dream had by its co-curator, the British novelist and art critic Michael Bracewell: Brian Eno appeared to him and declared, ''Germany is your America.'' A kind of reverie composed of drawings, paintings and films by multiple generations of artists, the show obliquely evokes Germany as, in Mr. Bracewell's words, ''our America -- our dream frontier.'' It is the Germany that has been home to numerous artistic and literary avant-gardes that he was thinking of.

A watercolor of fat, well-to-do pedestrians followed by hungry-looking wraiths made by George Grosz in 1946 still resonates today. By the less-well-known Swiss artist Xanti Schawinsky (1904-79), a painting from 1924 of a man in tails and top hat confronting a mechanical humanoid figure reflects his early association with the Bauhaus. His shadowy charcoal drawing from 1944 of medieval knights' helmets reveals a later trend toward humanist surrealism.

Closer to the present a film transferred to video documents ''I Like America and America Likes Me'', Joseph Beuys's famous stay with a coyote in a New York gallery in 1974.

Among contemporary works are portraits of Mr. Eno by Lucy McKenzie and Meredyth Sparks and a lovely painting of a woman by Katharina Wulff that could have been made in the 1920s. In a short, stop-action animated film made last year by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, crazy-eyed, wheelchair-bound World War I amputees roll in regiments across the screen. It has the inspirational title ''Degenerate Art Lives!''

PHOTO: George Grosz's ''Stickmen Meeting Members of the Bourgeois'' (1946), at Broadway 1602. (PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORGE GROSZ/BROADWAY 1602 AND DAVID NOLAN GALLERY)